1. Field of Art
This description pertains in general to mobile device software applications, and more particularly to advertising within mobile device software applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Online advertising has grown significantly in recent years. Web pages often include space for informational content desired by the web page's visitors (or, simply, users), as well as space for advertising (ad) content. The ad space on a web page is generally referred to as ad inventory. The publisher of the web page offers its ad inventory for sale, directly or indirectly, to advertisers. Advertisers purchase advertising space to place individual instances of ad content (or impressions) in front of users visiting the web page. Impressions are presented to the user with the hope of inducing the user to perform some desired act including, for example, clicking on an impression, visiting a specific web page, signing up for online services or news from a particular web page, or purchasing merchandise from yet another web page.
The online ad industry includes many different types of advertisers that represent companies producing a wide variety of goods and services. The supply for ad inventory has dramatically increased as the internet has grown. However, given the wide variety of goods and services to be advertised, not all web pages have ad inventory that is valuable to a given advertiser. Thus, advertisers, often in partnership with third parties such as ad servers, try to identify ad inventory that is valuable to their customers. Ad servers help advertisers target particular web pages and audiences of users, instead of indiscriminately placing ads in front of a large number of users. To do this ad servers collect statistics regarding user traffic on web pages to make better advertising inventory purchase decisions. These statistics include web pages visited by users and the actions taken by those users on the visited web pages. The goal of such targeted advertising is to increase the likelihood that the users receiving ads actually convert.
The proliferation of mobile computing devices (e.g., smartphones) including customizable software platforms has created a new avenue for advertising through software applications installed on such devices. Many advertisers are developing their own branded software applications or partnering with external developers to both provide mobile device users with useful software, and also to provide an additional avenue for advertising to the user. However, installing a software application is not as easy as presenting an ad on a web page. While many users are willing to tolerate ads on web pages, mobile device users are more discerning regarding which software they are willing to install on their mobile device. Thus, advertisers are currently seeking ways to increase mobile software application adoption.